Photoshop Elements is a popular photo-editing program you can use to modify, optimize and organize digital images. Photo-editing programs can be used to make imperfect snapshots clearer and more colorful as well as retouch and restore older photos. Within Photoshop Elements you can isolates objects in your images and apply special effects just to those objects and combie muliple images with layers.

Understand Digital Images


To work with photos in Photoshop Elements, you must first turn them into a digital format. When you save a photo on your computer, the computer turns the image content into lots of tiny squares called pixels. Editing a digital image is changing - recoloring and rearranging pixels.

Understanding Pixels
Digital images that are downloaded from a camera or scanner consist of millions of tiny squares pixiels, each composed of a single color. Photoshop Elements works its magic by rearranging and recoloring these squares. You can edit specific pixels or groups of pixels by selecting the srae of the photo you want to edit.

Bitmap Images
Images composed of piels are known as bitmap images or raster images. The pixels are arranged in a rectangular grid, and each pixel includes information about its color and position.

Vector Graphics
The other common way of displaying pictures on your computer is with vector graphics. Vector Graphics display images are generated from coordinates, as opposed to an array of pixels. Vector graphics images are made up of independent objects, each of which can de individually selected, sized, moved and manipulated.

Supported File Formats
Photoshop Elements supports a variety of files tyes you can both import and export. Popular file formats include BMP, PICT, TIFF, EPS, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and PSD, which stands for Photosop Document. Files that you save in the PSD and TIFF formats can include layers and other information that cannot be saved with the other formats.

For images published on the Internet, JPEG, GIF, and PNG are the most common formats.

File Size
An important way file formats differ from one another is the amount of storage they take up on your computer. File formats such as PSD and TIFF tend to take up more space because they save all the information that your camera or other devices originally captured. Tose format can also include multiple layers. JPEG, GIF, and PNG files are built to be sent over the Internet, so they sacrifice some quality for the sake of compactness.

Photoshop Elements Editor Workspace

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Photoshop Elements Editor


























Features

Photoshop Elements is fairly easy to use, as it works very similar to many applications you may already be used to. Open images usually are displayed in individual windows inside Photoshop Elements, though you can drag them to the top of the window to display them as tabs.

Learn Photoshop Elements

For Window Users

For Mac Users